It was the surreal piled on top of the phantasmic, the unbelievable on top of the incomprehensible, evil on top of more evil.

Nov. 27, 1978, Black Monday - San Franciscans, still reeling from the almost unspeakable mass murder-suicide that obliterated Jonestown in the Guyanan jungle only nine days before, were shattered again.

This time, the shrieks of horror and disbelief came from City Hall. Mayor Moscone had been assassinated in his office. His killer then walked down the hall and shot Supervisor Harvey Milk to death. In both cases, the coups de gra^ce were administered to the heads of the victims from a .38-caliber Smith & Wesson police service revolver.

The deranged killer: Daniel James White, a 32-year-old ex-supervisor, ex-paratrooper, ex-cop, ex-fireman, ex-high school jock whose short life was characterized by never quite grasping anything he reached for.

The cold-blooded killings were a coup de thea^tre to a minor political drama that otherwise would not have earned a footnote in San Francisco's turbulent political history.

They also erased whatever was left of this golden city's innocence, changing it irrevocably.

Twenty years later, what former Lt. Gov. Leo McCarthy called the insane tragedy of the City Hall slayings, like Jonestown, remains embedded in The City's psyche.

"People forget," says Supervisor Tom Ammiano of the assassinations and the tragedy at Jonestown. "People want to forget. But we can't. We need to keep history fresh. It's in the collective consciousness of San Francisco, those two dark events, and they still impact us in 1998."

*

Although in 1998 some see increasing similarities (in the recurring polarization of the politics and the shrillness of the rhetoric), San Francisco in 1978 was a far different city from today.

Despite its never-really-accurate reputation as a place of urban tolerance, there was an atmosphere of violence in The City that had permeated its politics for more than a decade.

There were years of often-violent anti-Vietnam demonstrations; urban guerrillas were blowing up PG&E substations and police cars; newspaper heiress Patty Hearst was kidnapped; anti-gay violence was common and a homophobic police department did nothing about it; unidentified serial killers dubbed Zebra and Zodiac stalked the nights.

Political debate was caustic, with narrow-interest groups pushing their agendas and rejecting all else. With district elections (which will be tried again next year) as the focus of much of the debate, there were neighborhoods vs. downtown, gays vs. cops, West-of-Twin Peaks vs. the poor.

In the Western Addition, there was an increasingly powerful group called Peoples Temple, but behind its social justice programs lay a reign of terror and violence that was to culminate in the Jonestown horror. Despite the rumors, The City's liberal politicians - Moscone, then-Assemblyman Willie Brown, District Attorney Joe Freitas and others - flocked to Jim Jones' side, giving him enormous, some said sinister, political clout.

Bombing was common. The Temple, for instance, was night-bombed; a police substation was bombed; the homes of such politicians as Dianne Feinstein and John Barbagelata were bombed. The latter events turned City Hall into the semi-armed camp that Dan White was to subvert two years later en route to his murderous rampage.

City Hall security, in fact, had been beefed up by Moscone only a week before his death because of frightening rumors of Peoples Temple hit squads and other terror that swept The City after Jonestown's White Night, Jim Jones' name for his apocalypse.

"In that context," says Kevin Starr, a San Franciscan, historian and state librarian, "maybe the events at City Hall and Jonestown were not as bizarre as they seem."

*

The three men who met in their deadly finale on that dark Monday were the odd couple plus one.

Moscone, three days past his 49th birthday, was a fun-loving ultra-liberal ex-state senator who had won election by fewer than 2,000 votes - the margin, some alleged, provided by illegal voters supplied by Jim Jones.

Milk, 47, who since his death has been elevated to a place of honor in the gay civil rights movement, was San Francisco's first openly gay supervisor and the point man for the gay and lesbian community's emerging political power. Milk had predicted his own murder in a chilling tape he made months before.

Dan White, 32, was the epitome of the all-American boy, if one overlooks the fact that this all-American boy never quite made it. An ex-high school football captain and ex-paratrooper, he had tried being a cop and had tried being a fireman and, on that day, had tried being a supervisor again. Fairly or not, he was portrayed as the great white hope for the conservative, old-line real San Franciscans, manning the ramparts against outsiders like Milk and his sort, and their front men like Moscone who were pushing The City far to the left.

Two weeks before, White - with a new baby, financial problems and other, unknown, demons - had decided he couldn't make it in still another profession and had quit his supervisor's job only 17 days after he got it. Now, White, who once described himself as "a believer in the American Dream that a person can do anything he wants when he sets his mind to it," wanted his job back.

On that fateful morning, dressed in a properly conservative three-piece suit, White climbed through a basement window to evade the metal detectors that would have spotted the gun he was carrying. He went to Moscone's office to plead for his job, only to learn the mayor was giving it to someone else. He shot Moscone in the chest and arm, then twice in the head.

White crossed the hall to Milk's office. White and Milk had a surface cordiality, although White had been the sole vote against Milk's gay civil rights ordinance and Milk had described White as "a stone cold homophobe."

They went into White's old office where the ex-cop drew his service revolver and plugged Milk in the chest, stomach and back before administering two final execution shots to the back of his head.

White, who later claimed to a detective he also wanted to kill Willie Brown and Supervisor Carol Ruth Silver, went to nearby St. Mary's Cathedral before calling his wife, Mary Ann, who was working at their hot potato stand at Pier 39. He then surrendered to his former colleagues at Northern Station and was taken to jail.

Reflecting the bitterly deep schisms and hatreds in The City, that afternoon unknown cops sang and whistled

"Danny Boy" and the Notre Dame fight song over the police radio. "Kill fags" graffiti appeared on the side of Mission Dolores. "Dan White for Mayor" was scrawled on neighborhood walls.

The divide became deeper and wider a few months later when White, after what many viewed as a lackluster prosecution by the district attorney, was convicted of manslaughter instead of murder. Thousands of angry gays and others took to the streets, trashing City Hall and burning police cars to protest the verdict that resulted in White, who later committed suicide, spending only five years in prison.

The riots, eerily, were called White Night, the same label Jim Jones had given to his mass suicide in Jonestown.

"I have never seen hate like I saw that night," says U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a San Francisco Democrat.

*

San Francisco was forever changed.&lt;

"Without the assassination of George Moscone, there never would have been a Dianne Feinstein for mayor or for U.S. Senator," says Mayor Brown. "And I think The City would have been a far more liberal and progressive place than it currently is."

Feinstein, who became mayor at Moscone's death, doesn't agree, saying San Francisco's natural political inclinations and the new realities of AIDS and homelessness would have slowed its leftward drift anyway and George Moscone, as a matter of political survival, would have moved toward the middle.

"The major lesson that I saw very clearly was, that in as diverse a city as San Francisco . . . if it is run from either end of the political spectrum, it polarizes things and won't work," Feinstein says.

"San Francisco has always been an island. The rest of the state is very different . . . and San Francisco kind of wants to go its own way. I don't think the partisanship that exists in Washington and elsewhere works in San Francisco. In San Francisco people learn they have to work across party lines (because) it's the most diverse place on Earth politically. That's why I've always felt the practical centrist agenda is the way to run The City."

With a narrowly divided board, with or without White, she said, Moscone would have had to shift toward the center, just as she and every other mayor since have operated closer to the political center than the edges. "You can't run The City with a narrow, narrow majority," she says.

The City may have drawn back from the left, too, because of the horror of Jonestown, Feinstein believes. Because of Moscone's close ties with Jim Jones and Peoples Temple - ties he shared with Willie Brown and other liberal powerhouses - he was vulnerable to defeat.

"As that whole story evolved, it would have been a very difficult thing for George Moscone to politically overcome," Feinstein says of the Jonestown tragedy.

"The thing that would have taken George down in an election would have been Jonestown."

Issues would have forced change&lt;

Whoever was mayor, Feinstein argues, his or her political range would have been limited by major issues that emerged in the early 1980s - the effects of AIDS, homelessness and Proposition 13, which cost The City half its property tax revenues. To deal with all three required support from a broad political spectrum, she contends.

The Rev. Robert Warren Cromey, rector of Trinity Episcopal Church, sees some positive results of the assassinations, though he says "20 years later, I still mourn the deaths every day.

"For one thing, there is the martyrdom of Harvey Milk," Cromey says. "He's been made a very important icon and hero in the gay-rights movement whereas as a legislator he hadn't done a lot in the short time he was supervisor.

"The fact that he was killed has meant many gay and lesbian people have been able to rally behind his political smarts for gay rights and justice."

California Assemblywoman Carole Migden, D-S.F., disagrees, saying that the political empowerment of gays and lesbians would have happened anyway as "just predictable developmental trends."

"Did Harvey envision a time when we would be more the masters of our own fate and has that occurred?" asks Migden, who was re-elected last Tuesday to the state Assembly. "Yes. Was he responsible for it? Absolutely. Would this have happened in his absence? Yes. I say this with respect, but if Harvey had packed up and become a shoe salesman in Duluth 20 years ago, we (gays and lesbians) would still be here (in politics)."

Ammiano, one of several gays and lesbians on the Board of Supervisors, agrees that progress would have been made whether Milk were dead or alive. But he cautions that the jury is still out on whether The City learned anything from the killings.

"It appears that at some upper levels, there's been a lot of removal of homophobic reactions," he says, citing a vastly improved police force as an example. "But if you scratch the surface, there still is lurking those violent impulses. . . . While I hear affirming things about gay people, I still hear double messages - no gays in the military, no gay marriages, there's a cure (for homosexuality) . . .

"It's not all bleak, but the murder in Wyoming (of a gay university student) and other acts tell us that while we've learned some things, we have a long way to go and what progress we've made, we could lose it."

Historian Starr says the assassinations at least for a time moved The City away from the bitter divisiveness that characterized political debate in 1978.

"San Francisco endangered its world city status because both of these events (Jonestown and the assassinations), one in its horror and the other in its sheer absurdity, gave San Francisco such a reputation for craziness. . . . We avoided giving that status away because everybody backed off from this demonizing process - the notion that you must agree with me on everything or you are the enemy."

Confrontational politics &lt;

Cromey and Migden fear, however, that the demonization of those who disagree is again in vogue and the political dialogue in 1998 may be returning to that confrontational, divisive, even hateful pitch.

"Us against them, there is that mentality now," Cromey says, noting sharp divisions on such issues as abortion and homosexuality but also on issues like rent control.

"It's very hard to have ambiguous views on anything. . . . You must be either totally right or you're totally wrong."

"I think The City is richer and stronger and more challenged than it was (in 1978)," Migden says. "But it is also more intense and more angry."

Seeing it essentially as a struggle between "old-time San Francisco versus the newly evolved San Francisco" - not unlike the struggle between White's vision and that of Moscone and Milk - Migden worries about the anger of debate. Although she calls the assassinations an aberration, she feels today's deteriorating political atmosphere is dangerous.

"Everyone is pursuing his or her agenda without thinking we all have a stake in other issues," she says. "We've got to look at things globally. I invite people to think more broadly about the implications of a decent, just and courteous society. What I'm struck with is there's a lot of not-niceness.

"San Francisco is becoming polarized and full of seething anger, much like it was then. There's a take-no-prisoners mentality that is abounding that's not constructive. The kids would say chill out."

The politics of sound bites &lt;

Former Lt. Gov. McCarthy also worries that the dialogue has become angrier. Political debate has been reduced to sound bites, says McCarthy, a native San Franciscan who now works in investments. "Those of us who've been in public life hope the media will pick up the knife we throw, the verbal gun we shoot . . . Nothing is in depth.

"Unfortunately, since people read less and less and since they rely on narrow-band television more and more, it's getting worse. It's really getting a lot worse when MSNBC has to build its audience relying on 24 hours a day of discussion of Monica Lewinsky."

While not saying either could happen again, McCarthy argues that both Jonestown and the City Hall assassinations happened in the kind of ugly, armed-camp atmosphere he fears is developing again.